Customer Involvement in Product Development

[Quirk]

Hi all,

I just made a form for potential customers to tell us what they want in a whiskey:

http://blog.cardinalspirits.com/whiskey-builder

I'm curious if any of you have tried involving the customer in your product development decisions, and if so how it has turned out?

Thanks,

Adam

[Scott @ Twenty2Vodka]

Interesting......

Would really be curious for an update in a couple months if participating like this is something that consumers actually do....getting consumers to suggest cocktail recipes is a challenge in it's self, I wonder if they will be more willing to suggest distilling characteristics for a product they won't be able to taste for at least 3 years?

Does the form builder you use protect against bots and automated spam posts? I had to disable comments on 2 of the wordpress sites I run because eliminating the spammed comment fields was becoming an actual daily burden. How will you know if your results are genuine (not spammed)? What will you do if the results of the survey disagree with how you feel?

thanks, -Scott

[MoonshineJane73]

^^For the spam issue, I'd probably flag the most commonly Spam words to trash messages with those words. I wish, wish, wish there was a government organization I could report blog comment spam to.

But, anyway, I like the poll idea. My first pick for customer involvement, though, would be to attract some customers who know whiskey for a taste-test and a questionnaire on what they like about your product and what they would improve.